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Think swinger hotels.
For aspiring porn industrialists, that’s the advice from Berth Milton Jr. — a Swedish smut king who is fighting to maintain control of his company in order to roll out a franchise of as many as 100 sex-themed five-star hotels around the globe.
Skeptics abound, but Milton — the flaxen-haired son of a Swedish photographer who was widely credited with creating hardcore pornography in the 1960s — said he has developed a can’t-lose strategy.
The idea is to give free rooms to frisky hotel guests in exchange for the right to broadcast their dalliances to paying customers live over the Web.
“The numbers are astonishing,” Milton told The Post, calculating that a single hotel could generate $43.8 million a year in subscription fees from voyeurs crouched over their computer screens at home.
“The important thing is to go all the way — not halfway or a third of the way,” Milton said. “Imagine how they were laughing at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they came up with their own ideas.”
In the 1990s, Milton built the reputation of a porn visionary while at the helm of Private Media Group, a Nevada-based, publicly traded adult-entertainment empire.
Among the first to see the potential of DVDs, Milton shelled out millions to stage X-rated versions of popular movies like “Cleopatra” and “Gladiator,” traveling to exotic locales to shoot them.
But Private Media’s fortunes have since faded as free Internet porn has sapped demand for DVDs. In addition to being slow to react to the new landscape, former business associates this summer accused Milton in court of systematically looting the coffers of the company to fund a lavish lifestyle.
While Milton battles charges that he borrowed more than $10 million from Private Media without paying it back, he’s also squaring off against a creditor in New York State Supreme Court next week.
The creditor is claiming as collateral a chunk of voting shares that could oust Milton from the board at Private Media’s annual meeting Nov. 18.
Milton, who has hired white-shoe law firm Jones Day, argues that the creditor’s right to the voting shares has already expired under a six-year statute of limitations.
If he prevails next week, Milton said he’ll mount a big push into licensed merchandise, including sex toys, condoms, lubricants and energy drinks.
He also sees the potential for porn to tap into more mainstream outlets as society’s strictures loosen — even in the US’s relatively uptight market.
“If you take a show like ‘Two-and-a-Half Men,’ it’s all about an adult lifestyle,” Milton said, referring to the CBS sitcom starring Charlie Sheen, who was recently found naked after partying with a porn star and trashing his room at the Plaza Hotel.
As for the hotels, Milton said he’s reached a few conclusions after doing field research at more than a dozen swingers’ clubs around Barcelona.
“It has to be a hotel for non-swingers as well — not super-explicit where everybody’s running around naked,” Milton said. “That takes the style and class out of it.”